On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 11:40, Rex Johnston wrote: > > I've spent years programming in VB, FoxPro, SQL(variants a many), > VBA, ASP, > You have my sympathies. Heh.
> > I've yet to actually see a fully interactive GUI based development > > and debugging enviornment such as you get with VB, ASP (Visual > > Interdev) and the rest of the Microsoft tools. The standard Unix, and FLOSS, approach to creating tools is: do one thing, and do it well. So the text editor handled the editing of text, the compiler compiled the text, and the debugger debugged the code. You can swap out parts of the chain to suit your needs and taste. For example, I use XEmacs -> gcc -> DDD while others may use KDevelop -> gcc -> gdb or Kate -> Intel CC -> DDD or Eclipse -> IBM JRE -> ... or Together-J -> gcj -> DDD or Vim -> Python -> gdb ad infinitum. It could be argued that Unix *is* an IDE, with man-pages, editors, compilers, and debuggers all mixed into the same environment. The problem is the IDE is so all-encompassing you cannot see it! But this is not your point. You want a shiny GUI, with buttons, and colours ;) There are quite a few out there; I suggest KDevelop or Eclipse, which seem nice if you like that sort of thing. > It sounds like you need to learn emacs. I tried once for a few months, > and while it's an impressive toolkit/IDE, it wasn't for me. I love the Emacs family of editors, but, like Vegemite/Marmite/Promite, it is a matter of taste. > Personally, i use vim. Personally, I think all vi users are sick and twisted :P (I know enough vi to get a real editor installed on a Debian box, and that is all I want to know!) Kate, which is embedded in KDevelop IIRC, is another popular editor. The latest GNOME Text Editor does do syntax highlighting, but it will never be as fully featured as Kate as it has quite separate goals. > It doesn't integrate a debugger, but since i'm programming mostly in > java & some C, it doesn't need to either. DDD is a good stand-alone debugger. Often I do not need an interactive debugger; I wait for a core-file to be dumped and examine it with gdb to figure out where the problem occurred. > > I'd start developing more applications for the Linux platform but > > I've yet to see anything other than very basic 'code and compile' > > CLI enviornments that I used to use back in the early 80's. That to > > me is a huge step backwards. It is not necessarily a step backwards. For an expert user (as most programmers are) a CLI is faster to use and more powerful than a GUI. A poorly written CLI is a step backward, but tools like GDB and bash, with their command-line completion and other interactive features, are not the same as the ol' CP/M and DOS prompts! Things can stay the same for a reason, not just because of laziness. Programmers are still frequently bound to the code-compile-execute-debug cycle, despite all the modelling tools, languages, and GUIs that have been thrown at the problem. The core task of a programmer â to translate fuzzy real-world concepts into unambiguous machine-interpreted commands â remains as hard today as it ever was. No GUI will help with that. -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/